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You know a video will be worth watching, when it opens with Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson doing their impressions of a seal. So here, let me bring that to you. It's the opening to an entertaining 34 minute interview with DP/30. I haven't seen Charlie this relaxed in a while. Fair warning, though: the audio quality is sometimes less than good.

Great news! Anomalisa is in contention for a Best Animated Feature Golden Globe, alongside The Good Dinosaur, Inside Out, The Peanuts Movie, and Shaun the Sheep Movie. No other nominations for the film, as far as I can tell. The whole list of nominees is on the L.A. Times site.

If you scroll down to the Animated Feature category, you'll find this great video: a roundtable interview with the directors of those films. (Charlie's not there, but Duke is.) I can't figure out how to embed it, so the link will have to do.

Meanwhile, Mike Ryan from Uproxx caught up with Charlie and Duke to get their reaction:

In this category, you’re up against something like The Peanuts Movie, which got really good reviews, but these are very different movies. “Best Animated” can cover a lot of ground.

Kaufman: Yeah, mostly – and certainly in this country – animated features are for kids. So, I think that’s the way it’s perceived. And we believe that animation is not a genre at all. It’s a form, it’s a medium – and you can do whatever you want in them and we would love to give other people that notion, too. And hopefully have more opportunity for diversity in the form. It’s a very exciting form, and I feel like it’s underrepresented in the type of movies that are made.

Do you think Anomalisa being nominated can help push that message out there?

Kaufman: I think we do. We talk about that and think about that a lot. And we talk to a lot of animators, when we do screenings, who come to us afterwards and talk about how happy they are: They’ve been looking for something like this to happen, to allow them to do other types of work rather than just kids movies. And the opportunity isn’t there. And they are hoping and we are hoping that other people get to make different kinds of movies with this form. (Source)

Variety's David Cohen visited Starburns Industries to interview Carol Koch, Anomalisa's sculptor, and to learn how she turned sketches and directors’ notes into finished designs. The video is part of Variety's "Artisans" series.

Here's a great, lengthy interview with Dan Harmon over at Den of Geek, where he talks Anomalisa, EternalSunshine, Charlie Kaufman, and Harmon's other work.

I’ve really never seen anything as well-written, considering the full picture, because the original medium was just the actors sitting on stools and the radio play, plus a Foley artist. And, as I sat down I thought, “Well, I’ve seen this done before, you know, modern takes on the old art form, live radio with a Foley artist.” But then Charlie Kaufman proceeded to—as he always does when you look back on his career—use that medium, limitations and all, to express something about the human condition that you could only express with that medium about identity, individuality, and our fetish for difference. And it was just mind-boggling.

So I’d always mention that was, like, the best thing I’d ever seen written in any written medium, period. So I think that was part of why Dino asked Charlie, “Are you doing anything with that ever and if not can we adapt it into a stop-motion film?”

[...] [I had a] conversation with him where he asked me a lot of questions about why it is I liked performing. When Charlie Kaufman’s asking you questions you immediately become terrified that he’s sizing you up. I felt much safer staying as far away from the process and from him as possible because what could I do but fuck it up? He needs no help. All he needs is a safe place to do his work uninterrupted. If you could provide that and then hide in a cabinet until he’s done, I think you’re doing a great thing for moviegoers. (Source)

Anomalisa did well at the L.A. Film Critics awards on the weekend! The film grabbed Best Animated Feature (runner-up: Inside Out) and runner-up Best Screenplay (behind Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy's Spotlight), while Carter Burwell took out Best Music for his work on Anomalisa and Carol.

I should've posted this closer to, you know, Thanksgiving, but time got away from me.

Apparently people were, in fact, looking for puppeteers in the wintry economic climate of the late '20s:

The Macy's parade started in 1924, but in 1927 its collaboration with Tony Sarg took things way up a few whimsical notches. Working with fellow puppeteer Bil Baird, a 60-foot balloon dragon, tottering Felix the Cat, hummingbird, and other buoyant wonders made their way down the Manhattan streets, and the crowds went wild.

[...] Sarg also worked on the annual Macy's holiday window displays from 1935 to 1942, the year he died of appendicitis. He considered the balloons "giant, upside down marionettes," and saw no limits to what they could do. Each year of the Macy's parade, he added new fanciful figures, ever more animated like a policeman shaking a nightstick, a 20-foot elephant, and a sea monster. (Source)

Here's a mini making-of featurette--a bit of time lapse, a bit of Charlie, some Duke and Jennifer... Just enough in these 90 seconds to make us wish the damned film was wide released and in front of our eyes already, am I right?

"I would say the film's biggest legacy was that it was an introduction to the world of two extremely gifted filmmakers: [screenwriter] Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, whom I hold in great esteem," Malkovich tells Rolling Stone. "In my mind, they're visionaries who have gone on to do some of the most excellent work in American movies for a long time.

"But [the legacy] for me, not so much," the actor adds. "I mean, in modern culture... [Long pause] It's kind of like if you get a blowjob from the wrong person, then your life becomes a blowjob. So Being John Malkovich always has to be referred to in some allegedly clever or ironic or snarky way." (Source)

So there you go. Also this:

"We [Charlie and Malkovich] were walking down the street in New York after I met him the first time. It was not long before we started shooting and he sidled over to me and said, 'I just want you to know I'm a big fan.' And I said, 'Well, thank you, Charlie, but I read the script, so you don't really have to do that.' And he kind of snorted."

indieWIRE has a good interview with Duke and Charlie, focusing mainly on what it's like to film an adult stop-motion movie.

CK: I think so much of that finds its origin in the voice records that we did. It informed everything in terms of the puppet performances and so we got the actors and did this thing, which inspired us, and then went on to inspire everyone else working in production. They were all there, all the time, sitting in the recording studio together. It was pretty similar to the way the play was done but a lot more intimate setting without the theatrical presentation.

[...]

CK: The biggest thing that I came across, right off the bat, was that you can't shoot this like a regular movie with multiple takes. You have to, because it's such a protracted process, break it down to the frame and pretty much get one shot. And so not only do you have to make that work, you can't really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you're waiting months and months and months before you can see if it's going to be working emotionally. And then to see the whole movie, you're pretty much waiting until the end of production. And the major lifting in terms of editing and all that stuff is done before you shoot the movie. That's an unusual way to work. (Source)